Quixey Wants to Unite Your Apps Into One Searchable Mega-Service

Quixey is taking app search into the data inside apps themselves.

Google Now is endlessly useful. It gathers and delivers all of your personally relevant news and information in a single place, and is available with just a tap of your fingertip. In essence, it dissolves the rigid app borders we’ve grown accustomed to on smartphones and tablets, but it really only does this to Google’s own apps. What if you could combine relevant information from thousands of third-party apps?

Quixey, a longtime provider of app search services, is trying to do just that. The company plans to move beyond simple app discovery and instead focus on the data contained within those apps.

“How weird is it that the web crawling we use today is basically the same as in the ’90s, but a little faster?” said Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan. “The web is no longer a series of HTML static sites,” he said. “You can’t ask Google, ‘How far away is my Uber? But that information should be available.”

To that end, Quixey is developing functional search across the entire Android app ecosystem. Let’s say you’re on the hunt for “Mexican food.” Normally, you might open up Yelp to find the nearest, highest-rated joint. Or maybe you start feeling lazy and browse through GrubHub or Delivery.com’s apps for delivery options. Better yet, perhaps you’re hoping to get a steal, so you check Foursquare or other apps for check-in deals that are going on. That’s a lot of hunting, pecking, and tapping in and out of apps, just to find some food.

With Quixey’s next-generation search algorithms, when you search for “Mexican food,” you’re going to get results from Yelp, GrubHub, OpenTable, Foursquare, and others. And not just your typical blue links to the apps themselves, which you’d get from today’s app searches. The results take the form of “deep links,” a shortcut straight to the information you want from those apps. So when you tap, you’re taken directly into that page in the app if you have it downloaded.

“We’re not only going deeper into apps, but creating a platform for search — a new way for developers to expose data,” Kagan says. Many developers don’t feel they can be discovered nowadays, he says. And with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from, for users, making sure you’ve got the right one for your needs is also a challenge. If every app is competing for your attention on equal turf, that’s good for you and for developers.

Of course, accomplishing this kind of deep, consolidated app search is no small feat, and it can’t be done by Quixey alone. But Quixey is beginning by building a fully automated system that, when you enter a search query, can access the data inside an app along the lines of how robots.txt crawls webpages in today’s web search. Developers can adjust the code in their apps to be a part of the program and make their apps searchable — Quixey can’t get access to an app’s data unless the developer makes it available. To make sure that this system works correctly, the company is starting small, rolling it out app by app and vertical by vertical, focusing first on restaurant apps.

Still, another scenario the company offered as an example was if you’re looking to play a game of virtual poker in an app. Right now, it may take up to eight taps to get to the exact kind of table you want in a game like Zynga Poker. But with Quixey’s search solution that can glean data from inside an app, you’d be able to search for an open table of Texas Hold’Em Poker, join it, and even get results from other poker apps you may not have known about.

“We think very few companies have thought about search. They think search is done and over, but it’s been lagging,” Kagan says. “Hopefully this doesn’t only launch a solution, but ignites a conversation about how to keep the web open and rearchitect for a newly evolving web of software.”